He won. Fair and square.

Well, maybe not fair. Vladimir Putin and his red army of bots had a thumb on the scales. Elon Musk offered to pay people to vote for him. And the media ignored his obvious cognitive implosion while spending weeks eviscerating President Biden for far, far less.

Regardless, he won. And there will be no insurrection in January when Congress convenes to certify the election results, because Democrats believe in the rule of law. Unlike the other party.

I’m not a political scientist, and I don’t have the stomach for endless hot takes about Joe Sixpack’s heartland authenticity.

I want to stick to facts. And the facts are these:

He is a convicted felon.

He is an adjudicated rapist.

He is a self-admitted sexual abuser.

He incited a murderous mob to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

He admires dictators and autocrats.

He trivialized a catastrophically infectious illness that killed more than a million of the citizens whom he had sworn an oath to protect.

He mocks people with disabilities.

He insults soldiers, sailors, and marines who have died for their — for our — country. He insults their grieving families.

He is a tax cheat.

He stiffs contractors.

These are not opinions. These are facts.

If you voted for him, you decided that none of the above points — to say nothing of the sad, damning entirety of them — was a dealbreaker.

This, too, is a fact.

In voting for him, you made a transactional choice. You chose what you think will be a healthier paycheck over morality and decency.

Again, a fact.

So don’t you dare lecture me about character or values or virtue. With your vote, you told the world that those things don’t matter to you. 

I’ll leave it to the economists to sort out over the next several years whether your transaction has paid off. I get that lots of people are hurting economically. I get that it’s a hell of a lot easier to vote for the guy who tells you it’s not your fault. It’s those other people who are to blame, the ones “coming to steal your jobs,” as if you ever had any intention of doing those backbreaking, low-paying jobs in the first place, as if the inflation that drove up prices wasn’t the direct result of the guy’s utter and indifferent failure to deal with that illness I mentioned above with even a modicum of competence.

But the political is the personal, right? And here’s where it gets personal to me.

That guy, the one you’re putting back in the Oval Office, and the people aligned with him politically who will hold the majority in the House and Senate, and the Supreme Court justices in the ideological majority? 

The policies they intend to enact, uphold, and enforce will put the health, wellbeing, and safety of my daughters and nieces at risk. 

They will cause immense suffering to people whose only transgression is to look different, to speak different, to worship different, or to love different.

They will hasten the environmental decline of a planet whose rapid, human-caused climate changes are destroying lives and property with increasing, explosive, savage regularity.

They will widen what is already a morally corrupt gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Those are dealbreakers for me.

And that’s a fact. | DL